Thursday, September 10, 2015

Staggering goodness and innocence

Tomorrow is the 14th anniversary of the attack that brought down the World Trade Center and put a hole in the Pentagon. Tom Englehardt, in an article posted on Alternet tells us what we managed to do for Osama bin Laden that he wasn't able to do himself. Englehardt's list is long. I can only share the highlights. In 14 years we've built a monumental national security state and a global surveillance system besting Germany of 1940, created a culture of fear, changed democracy into a billionaire's playground, demobilized the citizenry, made gov't more secretive, created warrior corporations, militarized domestic police, and starved national infrastructure.

We named that site in New York "ground zero" as if it had been hit by a nuclear bomb. That's how over the top the coverage was. Osama spooked the country into unleashing the dogs of war, which has brought chaos into the Muslim world.

One wonders what was going on before the attacks to see how swift and how pervasive was our launch into the Global War on Terror, the efforts to create a Pax Americana, and have a blind faith in our military as a force for human liberation. So we launched wars we can't get out of and we've created a big business in robotic assassination.

So far no one in Washington has taken any responsibility for blowing a hole through the Middle East, loosing mayhem across the planet, releasing the forces for creating a state built on terror, and prompting the current flood of refugees. Somehow we are still devoted to the idea that America is an "'exceptional' and 'indispensable' country of staggering goodness and innocence."

Commenters noted Englehardt forgot to mention the trillions of dollars wasted in these efforts and what that has done to the middle class.